Finally got to these series, one could say. I enjoyed it, but it felt a bit too tightly packed for my tastes. In fact, it was so action-packed I feel like it just flew by too quickly for me to form a full opinion on this. (Maybe I shouldn’t have read it in less than 2 days) But for such a short book, not only the action feels to be happening non-stop, with no time to breathe, we get introduced one after another to various wolves, witches, gremlins, vampires, gay lawyers… There are all these people in their stories and politics and concepts that keep piling and piling on top of each other, and it gets a little overwhelming. I like that there are so many thought-through details and branches, but I feel like this book would be a bit more enjoyable if we could slow down and linger on some things. Let the world-building settle in. Develop relationships some more. Get a better feel for some characters. Feels a bit too much like a drama episode made after a novel, where all the extra story ‘juice’ that makes novel a novel was sucked out and only the indispensableness bones and meat were left to make sure no action-movie lover could have a chance to feel bored even for a second. It’s hard to find a specific flaw in this, but there’s this feeling of ‘under-satisfaction’, of something missing, that leaves me with this cautious feeling of ‘I’ll get the next one and we’ll see’, instead of ‘I want the whole series right now!’ I was hoping for.
Heh… I was ready to give this book 4 stars, call it ‘a comfort book you read to get your mind away from your shit’, rant a little about its main character, and leave it at that… Until the very last chapters. The ending, unfortunately, made me take off at least 0.5 more stars and gave me a whole another topic to rant on. First of all, this book is still a ‘comfort book’ (like comfort food), where instead of a fairy god mother you get a handsome fae king with tattoos and rock band t-shirts to save you from your horrors and take you to a ball (and I’m sure many would prefer it this way). The only negative thing I can say about the character of Bargainer is that his ‘bad side’ was not entirely realistic, developed, or believable. From all the things he says and does, nothing really screams ‘dangerous and ruthless asshole’ other than the main character’s insistence that he is. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Even though I’m not really a fan of fairies and wouldn’t say that his ‘type’ is a one I personally would usually be attracted too (except for the fashion), the Bargainer is easy to understand, like, and emphasize with. The main character, however, is another story all together. Unfortunately, she does not escape the curse of female characters of romance literature you just want to throttle for her behavior from time to time. She is not the worst case, and is still tolerable, I can give you that, but with the progression of the story it becomes increasingly difficult to find anything to like about her, or any reason the Bargainer would like her this much. Except for the fact that she’s supposed to be very pretty… Which is just… no. She is a coward unless she uses her supernatural powers, she is self-centered, manipulative, and can’t make up her mind and refuses to listen or understand the man she claims she loves. It actually feels pretty strange, because, as readers, we see everything through her POV, but she sort of acts as a mindless conductor a lot of time, passing on the things that make a lot of things very clear to us readers, while she herself acts like she sees and hears them, but refuses to comprehend any of their meanings. It get’s rather frustrating to read their interactions with the Bargainer where he is making his intentions pretty clear all along, and she keeps to her song of ‘he never liked me and he will be cruel, and I shouldn’t like him’ that makes absolutely 0 sense. What really got me, is the part where the whole ‘twist’ (if we can even call it that, because it’s actually very strange and confusing, and I don’t really get why we needed it) is revealed, and she is so focused on her feelings she doesn’t even bother to apologize for all the shit she did and for her behavior. She’s just too happy for herself to think about how the other party feels. In general, it feels like the main character never really bothers to actually listen to her ‘partner’ and try to see things from his point of view, she is always too busy caring only about herself… and it doesn’t feel nice at all. Speaking of making 0 sense, there is the whole ‘main villain’ story part. While I’m aware that there’s probably more explanation in the following books, at the moment my impression is that the whole story line was pulled out of nowhere and flushed down the toiled. a) It makes absolutely no sense that it was going on for so many years on the scale that it was supposedly going on and no one managed to uncover or stop it; b) We are pretty much told that the Bargainer should have realized exactly who was behind the whole thing the very first time he brought the main character to his world – which brings us to c) it makes absolutely no sense that it took him so much time to find them since she actually told him how the man looked and he said he recognized him all that time ago. Also, since he was supposed to be able to trace her location using the beads. There are more things that make very little sense about it, but I don’t really want to go into details and spoilers. The whole ending sequence just felt random, confusing, and unbelievable… unfortunately.
Another negative point that I can’t help but mention is that the only two other real characters (the best friend and the ex-boyfriend) were treated terribly, and until the very last time they both make appearances were nothing but annoying nuisances written in a rather unpleasant light. Very much like with the Bargainer’s background, we get nothing but tiny vague hints about them, and no real character development. Which, I guess, sort of makes sense if we take into account the fact that we see the world through a main character who isn’t really interested in anyone but herself…
I’m planning to read the sequel once I get it, and I’m hoping to see a number of things there: to get more deeper information and more developed background story for the Bargainer, not just vague hints; less selfishness from the main character; a resolution to the ‘villain plot line’ that will actually make sense; some other actually properly developed characters that don’d add angst; less confusion and needless angst in general.
This book kept me apprehensive for a good half of it. Chiefly because there’s hardly anything I really really hate to read about more than people who get off on torturing and humiliating others. And in the beginning of this book, there is enough of that for a few. There’s torture, slavery, rape, humiliation, murder, people being burned alive and generally treated like worthless dirt left and right. It was pretty difficult to get through, to be honest. Since I was going into this blind (I got this book through a subscription box and have never read anything by this author before), and with a beginning like that, I sat ready to throw this book as far as I can at any signs of more gruesome rape and gore following. And while the gore is still there, I was pleasantly surprised by many choices the author made going forward. This book reminded me that I must be still a girl deep inside, because it is, let us be honest, chiefly a romance before all else, and it got into my head like I never expected it to. It gave me a lot of anxiety, and got into my dreams. I honestly couldn’t stop thinking about it. The main characters are very easy to like. I can hardly remember the last I found main characters as easy to like and understand as these two. They are not stupid, they are not annoying, they are not arrogant, or closed-minded, and, while they do make questionable decisions, they don’t act like self-centered idiots who constantly need to establish dominance over each other, and I really can’t stress enough how much I appreciate this. I do think the writing has a few issues. The switching between POVs was sometimes hard to follow, and time was swallowed in strange ways. And I also wish there was a bit more to this book. The second half especially, felt a little rushed. I think this book could do with some more substance around its middle, definitely, because the world is there and it is interesting enough to be spread out a bit more around the romance and the main struggles of the main characters. I was planning to give this book 4 stars, even if mostly because first chapters were really unpleasant and I can’t in any honesty say I loved it while those chapters are still in this book, but I’m actually going to be sappy and add an extra star just for the ending. Because thank you for not crashing us.
P.S. I also not sure I actually want to read a sequel to this… Because, wile I definitely would want more of this book, I definitely don’t want any more shit to happen to these two. And I also really didn’t want that thing who we all know shouldn’t have survived this book to survive… and since it did, it’s easy to predict that if there will be a sequel, it most likely will feature its revenge and… I really don’t want to read about any more things that thing might do to make the lives of these characters (and all beings in general) miserable. Let’s just leave them with the ending we’ve got… (If we could have a book that was about these characters without any more disturbing terrible things happening to them and around them, now I would read the shit out of that.)
DNFed. Twice. First time, I dropped it around chapter 4. The writing just felt terrible, I kept stumbling over it and going back to frown at it every few paragraphs. I wanted to scream that nespresso is the cheapest espresso machine there is (I checked UK Amazon later and saw that while it’s true for my country, they’re pretty expensive in UK and let it go) and the idea that the main character was from Slovakia was pulled in by the ears and then was not represented in any way in the rest of the text at all (not that I even finished the book, so maybe I’m wrong, but in the parts I did read it certainly didn’t have any sense for her to be from Slovakia). So I thought that was it, but then when I went to goodreads and took a look if people felt the same, I was surprised to see so many positive reviews. So I thought maybe I should give it a second chance and tried again. And it really didn’t get any better. Very soon I realized that the author was simply trying to write it like describing a cheap-ish detective drama, exactly the way you’d see things on the tv. It is full of clichés, none of them pleasant or nostalgic. Sexism, racism, psychopathic narcissists, closed-minded superiors, words ‘gay bashing’ dropping left and right… Detective Moss (almost Morse) and Dr. Strong (no comment). The interludes about the culprit – the very first chapter, the chat room, the part where the author actually tries to explain the whole psychology behind the murders in the very beginning of the book and then pretend like he didn’t – felt repulsive. Every few pages I’d come across some line of dialog or description that would make my hair stand up, and then it got to a point that this book was getting me angrier about my actual work of proofreading and editing texts, and I decided that there is no reason to torture myself any further if this book and me are clearly not made for each other. And judging by the reviews, I’m not missing much about the story either.
I’m sorry, but not only I found this book incredibly boring, I also couldn’t find a single aspect of it I could like. After I read first chapter, I thought I was about to read a light story about magic… I didn’t even need it to be exiting end intriguing, I just wanted it to be magical and captivating. But then it felt like it was turning more and more disappointing with every chapter. It was a struggle to read. I made myself finish it, and I won’t ever manage to remember all of the things I disliked, but here’re are some of the impressions I have left of it: 1) First of all, this story is not light, and neither it is pleasant, because you have to read about things like cutting people’s toes and biting rats’ heads off. And all the gore in it is just depressing. 2) For the first half of it I sometimes felt like I was reading some article in a cheesy housewife magazine on ‘what to pay attention to while in Paris’. Oh the name dropping… the fashion brands… the shops… the pastries…. I tried to tell myself it was supposed to be world building, but it didn’t work, and these descriptions got so very annoying so very fast. 3) I don’t know if the author was going for the whole ‘unreliable narrator’ thing, or if it just… happened, but the characters, on top of being extremely bland, are inconsistent, unbelievable, and utterly confusing. Everything about the main character is confusing. There character development is hardly there, and when it is, is more of a ‘and suddenly this naive girl is the most powerful untouchable being’. Also, she was supposed to be human for only year, and yet exactly nothing is there to back up that fact and make it believable. The whole ‘acts as an ally->betrays everyone’ and ‘acts like an asshole -> becomes close ally’ ideas were not executed well at all. I can’t even describe what exactly was wrong, but these descriptions felt too inorganic. The only way it could work, is if you believe this is how the main characters sees the world, while accepting the fact that she is an extremely fickle person with a heavy personality disorder on top, and changes what she thinks and her whole world view every hour. Also, there were only two characters who could show some promise, but both of them were washed down the drain. 4) The way the animals are treated. As in, being an animal repeatedly described as ‘being in dark place’, horrible dead existence, not feeling anything but hunger and fear, having no ability to love or think as an intelligent being… Just… no. This, and how the whole concept of ‘beasties’ was treated and described was likely my least favorite thing about this book. 5) Ideas being pulled in by the ears. As in ‘oh, suddenly, in this magic compartment of this magic bag, I suddenly find the exact specific potion that will allow me to create an astral projection of my body, and suddenly I know exactly how to use this rare old potion, and also, suddenly, my astral body will be able to handle solid objects, and of course, suddenly, I will manage to kill one of the most powerful witches just like that’. This book is full of these forced explanations jumping out of nowhere, and none of them feel remotely believable or organic.
I will leave it at this, because I don’t even have energy to dig back and argue about how things just don’t work in this book. Nothing in it made me care enough, sorry.
Skillfully written heart gripping story of faith, politics, and prejudice
This was a very surprising read for me, because I did not expect to like it this much. First of all, I hardly ever like YA. Second of all, I don’t enjoy reading about politics and intrigues. And yet this book held me interested all the way through to the very end. The writing is very good. The world is interesting and comprehensively built, even if small. And more importantly, characters feel true, their emotions and motivations clear and compelling. It was very easy to feel with them and for them, and never once I felt like they’ve been stupified, as I so often do with YA. This is not a light story, it is full of blood, intrigues and betrayal. There are fanatics, religious or political, there’s torture, death, child soldiers, and the main characters have to fight for things that are so much larger than them, and against things that are so much larger the them. I liked that the ideas of right and wrong, of learning to see things from different sides, of reacting to changing circumstances no matter how painful the situation is to believe in, are in the heart of this book. This book kept me tense a lot of time, and even when I didn’t really want to be reading something that made me feel so tense, I still couldn’t put it down. I’ll be looking forward to and dreading the sequel.
Although, I don’t know who decided to market it as a book about ‘gay pirates’ (which I learned after skimming through the first page of goodreads reviews), but it was clearly a mistake. This is not in any way ‘a book about gay pirates’. It is worth a read though, regardless.
A tiring experience, not nearly immersive enough to outweigh its cruelness.
I’m really on a fence with this one. On one side, this book gets pretty dark and tries to appeal to more mature readers by talking about heavier moral issues and questions of life and death, and it isn’t bad per se.
On the other, it still features the very YA shallow writing and world-building, dismissal of supporting characters… including the one who was probably supposed to be the second main character, since he gets his own POV and all, but ended up a repeatedly dismissed in both writing and story as a shallow insta-romance love interest (I can’t say I counted, but the Nedra/Grey chapter ratio is something like 3-4/1, and a lot of Grey chapters are hardly longer than 1 page… I mean, why even do it if he can be so easily dismissed?).
The biggest issue I have with this book is with the way it ‘skims’ over everything, barely touching the surface. The time flies, days, weeks, months, lives, are only mentioned flying by, the flow of time doesn’t feel real, the reader has no chance to plant their feet in the world and look around, see how they feel about all of it. Nedra is strong, talented, clever, and mature girl… but she is also single-minded, closed-minded, arrogant, and dismissive in a very unpleasant way. I didn’t like reading in her 1st person POV because it was full of ‘I know what is best and everyone needs and appreciates me, and if they don’t understand how important what I do is they are clearly useless’, which was made worse by the shallow world-building that made it hard to feel the horrors of the plague real and see what was really going on in the world that it would make Nedra’s attitude at least more proportionate. I do not want to go in details to spoil the actual story content, but every time she would act almost likable and say something reasonable, it felt like a ‘fluke’ (or like the author/editor had to add it as an afterthought) and then she go back on it right away or acts like it was a mistake to feel anything human. Nedra is a tiring character to follow, but the Grey is written so shallowly he is even worse…
And that was the impression I got from this book – it’s not bad enough to actually hate it, but it’s so tiring to read and not nearly immersive enough to compensate for its cruelness.
It’s packed with good ideas, but betrayed by rushed execution.
It’s a good book. And while I liked the story and think that it’s pleasantly enough written, here’s why it’s 4 stars and not 5:
-It feels underdeveloped and rushed. Like a movie instead of a book. Or like someone took a much longer and complicated novel and made an abridged version of it. There were very nice ideas and moments, but it didn’t feel like they were explored. I honestly felt like I was being rushed through the story, without getting the full experience.
-Perhaps related to the previous point, but it also asks the reader to take for granted a lot of things without explaining how they really work in the world. Or much about the world in general.
-It didn’t really escape the ‘teenage heroine that makes you want to smack her for her stupidity’ curse of YA literature. I don’t know if it got a bit better towards the end, or if I just got used to it.
-There were cringy moments that personally rubbed me the wrong way. Felt like cringingness for the sake of cringingness – and while I know some people are fans of that, I am not.
I do think it’s good read… if you don’t mind being left with more questions than answers and completing the world you’re reading about in your head instead of getting it from the book, or feeling like you just watched a nice sci-fi movie, instead of reading a novel, and I also think I’ll try to pick up the sequel when it comes out, but I do think it leaves a pretty noticeable ‘something’s missing’ aftertaste.
A book captivating enough to make me ignore the fact that I hate a lot of its ideas.
This book is written well enough so that I couldn’t stop turning pages, even though after every chapter I kept thinking “torture, intrigues, love triangles, spies, and disgusting people who get off humiliating others? I like none of those things and don’t really want to be reading about them… especially now”. In fact I actually had to skip through some of the more unpleasant parts closer to the end.
And yet, I think this is one of the better YA books out there, just from the way it’s written, especially for people who don’t mind the above mentioned.
I do sincerely hope, thought, that the second book will contain less of the themes I hate to read through, and more of new original ideas and good writing. Though I’ll probably buy it regardless, since I’m interested to see where the story will go.
Disappointing execution of a disappointing concept.
I wanted to like this book. And I thought I did for about two first chapters… until the language and the way the story was told begun turning increasingly disheartening. Another good idea utterly betrayed by a very pure execution.
This book fails spectacularly regarding immersiveness and world-consistency. First, I kept feeling that more and more of geographical and historical descriptions felt somehow wrong, but decided that since it’s a fictional version of the world I shouldn’t care so much… But then I almost DNFed (I had to put it away for couple days) when I reached phrase “asset to be liquidated”. Because, seriously? Did the author even try to care about how her protagonist sounded? This and many more very modern phrases and thoughts, jump out from pages, break the immersion completely, and make it impossible to believe in the setting of 1280 Asia. I don’t know if it is carelessness, laziness, or if American YA writers are simply expected to write books like they can only be read by young girls who only care for the cheesy girly feelings and ‘unconscious cuddling,’ and not about things like writing language, consistency, and believability… (It isn’t too difficult to type ‘bullet’ into a search engine and look up the etymology and first known use, is it? Though I suppose something like common sense should tell you it’s not very appropriate for 1280 even without having to look it up… And neither is “yep” Or phrases like “thanks but no thanks”.) But it made me very sad and by the second half I was kind of skimping through a lot of text, instead of trying to enjoy submerging myself in the story (because I knew I wouldn’t be able to, and only would turn more irritated by finding other examples of questionable phrasing…)
Also, the summary is misleading. “Ghosts” have practically nothing to do with the story at all, and their very short “appearance” makes place only at the very end and felt very forced and useless. Otherwise there are only memories and dreams.
Lastly, the least it could have done is follow through with its silliness and have some sort of unexpected positive ending. But noooo, it does the most boring thing of sticking with the unpleasant ending of the original story, which became the tip on the mountain of my disappointment with this book… (The author says she was outraged with it, and than just repeats it in her own work word by word. I don’t see the logic.)
Would I pick this book up if I was browsing at a store? 99% not. (Might have something to do with very toxic pink of the inside cover of Owlcrate edition, tbh.) The themes in this book are something I have absolutely no first-hand knowledge of, and could hardly relate to (hoods, black cultures, teenage dating). Doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in them, I love to read from perspectives of different cultures, but it does mean that for the whole duration of this book I couldn’t really tell if I should be taking it seriously (believing what it was putting down), or not. In fact, I would actually like to know how people who relate to the background of this story (who come from the area and cultures described) felt about this book. Is it relatable or is it laying it too thick?
I would have given this book more stars, because it has its own world, and the writing is pleasant and charming, if not for one thing – the main character. And I honestly couldn’t tell if this was a writing quality problem of inconsistency of presentation, or if it was a realistic representation of type of a teenage girl mentality I simply didn’t want to know anything about… One minute she is clever and responsible, the next she is arrogantly blind and annoying. Is she calling this boy a ‘home’, and saying how it is easy, comfortable, and ‘right’ to be with him, or is she only going out with him to make the other boy jealous? One minute she says ‘you gotta have your boy’s back’, the next she believes what someone else told her about him withing a second. In fact, she kind of seems to believe whoever was the last to talk to her. I love him, I hate him, I love him, we can’t be together,… every three-four pages the main character changes what she thinks and feels and if that’s how teenage girls are supposed to be I’m glad I wasn’t really around for that phase.
The reason I’m more inclined to believe that this is a writing issue is that a lot of other characters are treated in the same way. A boy who was supposed to be in love with her sister for a very long time suddenly is in love with other girl and there isn’t any explanation, a girls who was almost an antagonist and bitchy as hell is suddenly all nice and helping, there are characters who get introduced and dismissed right away, and story points that could have gone somewhere being dropped and forgotten all over the place… Everything is just so… fickle.
This book felt like it could have a lot of potential the way it began, but about half way through it’s like it was all rushed through and scrambled, like the author just had to finish it and be done with it, leveling behind undone more than half of ideas that she had at some point.
Should probably also mention that this book is full of poetry, and it seems like it would be a big plus for those who enjoy it.
Overall, I feel like I wish this book could have been rewritten properly, with more depth and exploration, picking up all the little branches and focusing on its own details, and then I could have actually honestly liked it.
An account of a young soul trapped in a tiny world.
I might have built this book up a bit too much for myself in the beginning. I don’t really know why, but the first chapters made me imagine something really horrific happening, and it made me hesitant about taking it down from my bookshelf for a long time… Because of that for the first half of it I was swimming in this ‘is that it?’ confusion, and it made more sense only towards the very end. I think this book gave me an opportunity to remind myself how for a lot of people even things that seem little and insignificant to me can be real nightmares. That there are a lot of people who are trapped in very small worlds, with no one to get them out.
I actually liked that this book focused on not painting things in black and white, even though I personally tend to. Even though I felt like not a single person reacts or relates to things like I would in their place, I can relate to loving people who try to break your life in pieces and learning how to get yourself out.
I also think that the writing is quite good, though I probably would’ve preferred it if some scenes and issues were explore a bit more deeply. I think this is one of those books where it makes a lot of sense to read it once, and re-read it right after, from the new perspective.
An interesting idea, yet shallow and underdeveloped.
There’s certain charm in fairytale re-tellings.
I personally like the sense of safety you get when you kind of know what where it is going to go, but read it for the experience anyway. Well, everyone knows this, it’s why we still get new movies based on fairytales all the time and watch them none the less.
This… has hints of a number of fairy tales, but they are only hints, there for no particular reason but to be there. I wouldn’t call it a re-telling in any way.
I think it has a number of interesting elements tied together by strings that seem more often than not too thin.
Story elements spring out of nowhere or die in nothingness… often enough to mildly bother me, but not often enough to actually hate it.
The whole concept of Lunars and shells and how do they work and where did they come through seemed underdeveloped, under-explained, and a bit too far-stretched.
I was sort of glad that Prince Kai was not a haughty blind (idiot) with a tone of issues like princes so often are in YA books, but on the other hand he seemed a bit too nice to be believable as an Emperor.
In fact, believability is a rather big issue with this book as a whole. The whole state of the Earth, the relationships between races, the reasons for the way cyborgs and androids are treated the way they are, Lunars, as I have already mentioned it… Hardly anything is ever explained in a believable way, and most issues are glided over in a manner that says ‘this is YA sci-fi, stop thinking and just accept things at their face value and swallow down without chewing’.
I can’t say I loved it, but I would like to see where it goes from here.
This is considered YA? Really?
There are several reasons why I doubt it. Firstly, is that that while it shares the ‘reads like a movie’ aspect with most of YA novels, its writing goes at least one lever deeper and better than any YA I have read (and yeah, maybe this is the exact reason I haven’t read enough to know otherwise). It reminded me somewhere of reading Dorothy Allison, and not only because of the obvious topics, but because of the vivid images and excellent attention to details, and especially emotional ones.
Secondly, I, at least, would consider the topic to be a bit too heavy for YA.
While I can’t call this story exactly unique or say that is shows something shocking we’ve never seen before, (it says it itself – girls go missing all the time; and again, people like Dorothy Allison immediately come to mind), especially since most people probably watch shows like Criminal Minds and LAO SVU, it is an artfully created experience.
It is not a long book, and it feels shorter still because of the podcast format most of it takes, and maybe that is why it is considered YA. But I don’t think it loses any depth because of its format, and I haven’t once felt like there were holes left in it. Its characters all come alive in front of your eyes, and you can feel every single one of them as if you are looking right at them. As does the scenery, and every town, even if you’ve never been to the States.
What I also appreciated about it, is that this was a story about love.
It would be easy to pull it apart, picking up at every human flaw and misguided decision, but… This book is written well enough to stop me from wanting to do it, and that is the most important point for me personally.
I rate it 3.5-ish, but rounded it up simply because I will actually be looking forward to see where the next book goes.
I must say, this books gets better towards the end, and not because you might think (not because that’s where the real action in this kind of books begins to happen).
Unfortunately, I almost missed it, because I had a lot of trouble getting through the first half, and here’s why:
1) “A bunch of screw-ups and kids-who-don’t-deserve-it get thrown into a deadly dangerous situation without responsible adult supervision. Who do you think will survive, if anyone?’ is how it reads for the whole first half, and I kept thinking “well, isn’t it ironic that this book tries to make fun of stupid horror movie stories and then basically follows in their steps”? Enter a dozen of unbelievably stupid decisions that are likely to make a few of less tolerant people close this book forever.
2) The writing is inconsistent at best. Sometimes it bordered on the ‘okay, yeah, fine’, with an occasional sentence making my editing fingers and eyebrows twitch, and sometimes it fell entirely into the field of ‘someone really should have edited this a few more times before getting it out…’. It’s the odd word and phrase choices that don’t really fit and ruin immersion, it’s the fact that the interludes feel like they weren’t thought through enough to feel organic… It was simply speaking… too rough to be read smoothly, and it irritated me a lot.
3) More even than the surface lack of polish in writing, it really bothered me how this book treats character development descriptions. It tries to raise some issues and give its characters interesting back stories, but it kind of fails to do a good job of it – it fails to do it organically. It chews on everything extensively, explaining what people feel and why exactly, instead of showing it. Ideally, a book is supposed make its reader aware of a character’s ‘issues’ without actually spelling them out in a way that gets you thinking ‘does it really make sense that this person is aware of all their inner issues and actually name them to themselves, yet still behave the way they do…?’.
In short, it does this thing where, for the most of the story, instead of letting readers pick up on things on their own, it says ‘here, I’ll spell every psychological issue out for you, name it and explain every little thing, like you’re too stupid to understand on your own’. It tries to employ interesting issues, but pretty much fails to present them correctly.
It’s hard to talk about this genre without much spoilers. So I’ll probably leave it here.
Overall, while some of the story decisions I find questionable, it gets actually interesting enough to make you want to read the sequel, even if only out of curiosity, and that is what matters.
Keina Daria 